R. Dwayne Betts served nine years in prison for his role in a carjacking. During that time, he became a voracious reader and writer. His first book, A Question of Freedom, is drawing critical praise.

AN INMATE'S 'PLEA FOR REFORM'

Another writer is out with a prison memoir that carries a message of hope.

Jarvis Jay Masters' That Bird Has My Wings (HarperOne, $24.99) will be published in October. Masters, 47, has been in San Quentin since he was 19. He is now on death row. Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls Masters' story "a plea for reform, for a common humanity."

Masters is also a poet. In 1992, he won a PEN Award for Recipe for Prison Pruno.

By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON  R. Dwayne Betts is having coffee at Busboys and Poets, a coffeehouse/bookstore/neighborhood hangout here in the trendy U Street area. He's talking about his wife, his 20-month-old baby boy, his freshly minted degree from the University of Maryland and his new book, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery, $23).

At 16, Betts was sent to prison for nine years. Now 28, he is living such a radically different life even he is astonished by how far he has traveled.

"I still remember my mom crying in the courtroom when I was sentenced," he says. "I didn't want that image to be the only thing I remembered the rest of my life."

A good student raised by a single mother, he started running with the wrong crowd. Betts' crime was hijacking a car at gunpoint with a friend, six felonies in all. He was prosecuted as an adult in Virginia, where the crime occurred.

His memoir takes the reader from the day he made that 30-minute "egregious error" to his life in five prisons and eventual freedom.

Betts wouldn't call his life in prison a gift, but he quotes what the judge told him at his sentencing. "I'm under no illusion that sending you to prison will help you, but you can get something out of it."

He did. It was there — often in solitary confinement because of his "sassiness" — that he read voraciously, wrote journals and fell in love with poetry. A collection of his poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, is due next year.

He was introduced to poetry when someone, he still does not know who, slid The Black Poets by Dudley Randall under his cell door.

Poetry "came to me at a time I needed to express myself, and I needed to do it in a way people would listen to the whole thing," he says. "A poem can say everything you say in a novel in much less space. They're musical. People hear the music in poetry." (He is working on his MFA in poetry, which he expects to finish next July.)

Betts is drawing attention for more than just his writing, however.

"We see this as a searing literary debut," says Megan Newman, publisher of Avery which bought Betts' memoir. "Dwayne has an unexpectedly strong and mature voice.

"But I was also taken with his sense of mission and dedication to juvenile-justice issues. And since I'm in publishing, I adore being involved in publishing a book by a young man who saved his own life through reading."

Betts is the national spokesman for the Campaign for Youth Justice, speaking out for juvenile-justice reform. He also visits detention centers and inner-city schools, talking to at-risk young people.

"It's not a Scared Straight kind of thing," he says. "It's just me having a conversation with them about the importance of writing and poetry and how it can change their lives.

"I'm the voice of someone who has been there."

In the same vein, he began YoungMenRead, a book club in the Washington, D.C., area where he introduces young men to his favorite writers: John Edgar Wideman, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck.

As for his memoir, Betts says it's really about going from "one unexpected thing (his arrest) to another unexpected thing (his life as a writer/poet)."

"If all this hadn't happened," he says, "I'd have played point guard at Georgia Tech and studied to be an electrical engineer."

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